Competitor Audit Worksheet | Free Guide

Why you audit competitors before you build a marketing plan

Most owners build a marketing plan by listing what they want to do. The better order is the other way around. You audit the shops who take work from you first. You score them honestly. Then you build a plan around the gaps where you can win.

This is not about copying anyone. It is about seeing them clearly. A competitor with 400 Google reviews and a fresh one every week has a wall a new entrant cannot climb in one season. A competitor with 25 reviews and nothing since spring has no wall at all. The first is a shop to go around. The second is open ground to take.

Here is the part most owners miss. Dominance in the trades is almost always local, and it is thinner than it looks. When you actually score your block, you usually find nobody owns it. The map pack is a coin flip. The phones go to voicemail. The websites are business cards. That is not a threat. That is a door.

This worksheet is how you find the door.

Step 1: Pick the right competitors to audit

You are not auditing every operator in your metro. You are auditing the ones who actually take work from you.

Pull a list of five to eight competitors using these filters:

Two market leaders. The names that show up first when a customer searches your trade plus your city. These set the ceiling.
Two direct peers. Shops roughly your size who work your area and your kind of customer.
Two emerging threats. Newer brands with fast review growth, fresh wrapped trucks, or ads you keep seeing. These are the ones who will be your peers next year.
One or two national or franchise units. Any shop operating under a national parent or franchise umbrella. They compete differently, so you score them differently.

If you cannot tell whether a shop is a franchise, search the brand name plus the word "franchise," or check whether the website footer names a national parent.

Step 2: The six-category scoring system

Score every competitor on the same six categories. Use a 1 to 5 scale. Score yourself last, so you do not anchor on your own numbers.

Category A: Reviews (count, rating, and recency)

Reviews are not vanity. They drive where you land in the map pack, whether a stranger clicks your ad, and who gets picked when a homeowner compares three names. In BrightLocal's 2024 Local Consumer Review Survey, 75% of consumers say they read reviews for local businesses always or regularly, and 81% use Google to do it. Reviews are the single loudest trust signal on the internet, and they compound.

They also move rankings. In the industry's Local Search Ranking Factors research, Google Business Profile and review signals sit among the strongest factors for where you show up in the local pack. Review count, review velocity, and whether you reply all get weighed. More real reviews, arriving steadily, answered promptly, is a moat you build one job at a time.

Score each competitor on:

Google review count. 1 = under 30. 2 = 30 to 99. 3 = 100 to 249. 4 = 250 to 499. 5 = 500+.
Average rating. 1 = below 4.0. 2 = 4.0 to 4.3. 3 = 4.4 to 4.6. 4 = 4.7 to 4.8. 5 = 4.9+. This matters because homeowners set a floor. In BrightLocal's 2026 survey, 68% of consumers will not consider a business under 4 stars, and 31% will not go below 4.5.
Review recency. Are reviews coming in this month? Recency is its own trust signal. BrightLocal found consumers want to see recent reviews, not a wall of praise from three years ago. Score 1 if the newest review is over 90 days old. Score 5 if reviews land every week.

A competitor with 400 reviews and a fresh one every week is in a different league from a competitor with 400 reviews who has not earned one in six months. The first is actively building. The second is decaying, and their star average is about to start slipping in the eyes of every buyer who checks the dates.

Category B: Google Business Profile completeness

A complete Google Business Profile is free, and most competitors leave it half done. That is free ground. Score:

Primary category and services filled out: yes or no
Service area defined accurately: yes or no
Photos posted within the last 30 days: yes or no
Q&A section actively answered: yes or no
Posts published within the last 30 days: yes or no
Owner replies to reviews, good and bad: yes or no. This one pays twice. BrightLocal found 88% of consumers would use a business that replies to all its reviews, versus just 47% for a business that replies to none. Replying is free and most shops do not bother.

Six out of six is a 5. Three out of six is a 3. Zero out of six is a 1. Most competitors land between 2 and 3, which tells you exactly how much open ground is sitting there.

Category C: Website conversion

You are not scoring how pretty the site looks. You are scoring whether it turns a stranger into a booked job.

Check each competitor's website for:

Phone number visible in the header on mobile, as a real tap-to-call link
A clear call to action above the fold (book, quote, call)
Online booking a customer can complete at 9pm on a Sunday without calling
A page for each major service, not one catch-all page
Reviews and real job photos on the homepage, not buried on another page
A ballpark price or an instant-quote tool, so the buyer gets a number instead of silence

Score 5 if the site does all six. Score 1 if it does none. Most home service sites in your market will score a 2 or 3, and every empty box is a place they are quietly handing you work.

Category D: Brand presence and saturation

This is where a lot of good independent shops lose without realizing it.

Score:

Truck wraps. Are the trucks wrapped with the logo, colors, phone number, and a plain description of what they do? Or unmarked? A wrapped truck is a rolling billboard you pay for once. An unmarked truck is a job that drives past a hundred future customers and says nothing.
Uniforms. Branded gear, or street clothes?
Yard signs. Walk a neighborhood you both serve. Whose signs are in the lawns after a job wraps?
Local saturation. Did the competitor concentrate in a tight radius, or spread thin across a footprint they cannot really service? Owning one zip code cold beats being a rumor across the whole metro. The shop everyone in a neighborhood recognizes wins the referral every time.
Reputation footprint. Search the brand name. Do they show up on Google, in a maps listing, with reviews, on social, with a real website? Those are the core visibility pieces that generate leads on their own. Mark how many the competitor has covered.

Category E: Premium signal

Premium signal is the by-product of doing the work right and looking like it. Clean wrapped trucks, techs in branded gear, plain confidence on price. It is what lets a shop charge more without apologizing, and it is what makes a nervous homeowner pick them over the cheaper name.

Score:

Trucks newer than five years old and clean: yes or no
Technicians arrive in clean branded gear: yes or no
Visible tech in the field (tablets, digital invoicing, on-site card payment): yes or no
Guarantees and warranties stated plainly on the website: yes or no
Pricing positioned with confidence, no "starting at $39" lowest-price bait: yes or no

A shop that scores high here is telling every customer they are the safe, professional choice before a word is spoken. A shop that scores low is competing on price whether they meant to or not.

Category F: Speed to lead

This one you measure yourself. Call each competitor like a customer. This is the cheapest category to win on and the one almost nobody protects.

Did they answer the phone live on the first try? Invoca's research found roughly 27% of calls to home service businesses go unanswered. A caller who hits voicemail usually does not leave one. They call the next name on the list. Simply picking up puts you ahead of a real slice of your market.
If they did not answer, how long until a callback? Time the gap. A homeowner with a leak does not wait around.
Fill out their web form. How long until a human follows up? This is the big one. The Lead Response Management Study out of MIT, reported in Harvard Business Review, found that responding to a web lead within 5 minutes makes you about 100 times more likely to reach that person and 21 times more likely to qualify them than waiting 30 minutes. The same research found only 7% of companies even respond within 5 minutes. The first shop to call back usually gets the job. Most of your competitors are not that shop.
Quality of the booking conversation. Confident and consultative, or rushed and transactional?

Speed to lead is won with a phone that gets answered and a system that texts a new lead back the second it lands. That is not a big spend. It is the highest-return fix in this entire worksheet.

Step 3: The scoreboard

Build a simple grid. Six categories across the top. Each competitor and yourself down the side. Score 1 to 5 per cell. Total at the bottom.

You now have an honest snapshot. Three things will jump out:

1. The category where you are weakest against the field

2. The category where the market leader has the biggest moat

3. The category where everyone is bad, including the leader

That third one is where you build your wedge. When the whole market is slow to answer the phone, or nobody has online booking, or every website goes silent on price, that is not a small thing. That is the gap you take.

Step 4: The gap-prioritization grid

Not every gap is worth closing. Sort each one into a quadrant by plotting cost-to-close (low or high) against impact-on-booked-jobs (low or high).

High impact, low cost. Close these this quarter. Setting up an automatic review request after every job. Getting your Google Business Profile to six of six. Training the office to answer the phone live. Turning on an instant text-back for new web leads. These are cheap and they move revenue fast.

High impact, high cost. Plan these for the next 12 months. Wrapping the fleet. Rebuilding the website with online booking and an instant-quote page. Adding a CRM that fires follow-ups on its own.

Low impact, low cost. Do these only after the high-impact work is done. Small social polish. A business card redesign.

Low impact, high cost. Skip these. Chasing a national brand on TV spend while your basic Google profile still sits half finished.

Most owners get this backwards. They spend money in the low-impact, high-cost corner because it feels like progress, and they skip the high-impact, low-cost corner because it feels too simple to matter. The audit is what stops that. Fix the cheap, high-impact stuff first. Every time.

Step 5: The offseason weakness audit

Most competitor audits get run in the busy season, when everyone looks healthy. The audit that matters most is the one you run in the slow months, when the weak operators start to crack.

Plenty of home service shops live and die by season. Revenue collapses in the off months, cash gets tight, and the ones with no plan for it start making distress moves you can see from the outside. If your competitors run cold and you have built something steadier, the slow season is when you take share for cheap.

Here is what to check, and both ad tools below are free with no login:

Are their ads still running? Pull up the Meta Ad Library (facebook.com/ads/library) and the Google Ads Transparency Center. Search each competitor. Both show you every active ad they are running right now, with no account and no cost. If a competitor's ads went dark in October, they just conceded the offseason. Advertise when your competitors have nothing to say and you own the market's attention for a fraction of the price.
Are they hiring or laying off? Check Indeed, ZipRecruiter, and the careers page. A shop in trouble stops hiring and starts cutting. That is your window to pick up good techs the competition let go.
Are their trucks showing up used? Search Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, and local trade groups for competitor logos on used trucks and equipment. A branded truck for sale is a tell.
Are reviews slowing? A competitor whose review flow drops to zero has probably lost the tech who was asking, and maybe the techs too.
Are they running follow-up? Submit a quote request to each competitor and track who calls you, who calls a second time, and who never calls at all. A shop that quotes once and goes quiet has a follow-up problem dressed up as a leads problem. That is the easiest kind of competitor to beat, because the fix on your side is just a system that does not forget.

The offseason audit tells you who is weak. The next step is deciding what to do about it.

Step 6: Seller-motivation framework for acquisition targets

If your audit surfaces a competitor in real trouble, you have a third option beyond "compete" or "ignore." You can buy them.

This is not a fantasy for small shops. Interest in owning home service businesses is at an all-time high. Private equity's share of HVAC acquisitions jumped from 8% in 2023 to 23% in 2024, per ClearlyAcquired. That money mostly chases the big operators. It leaves the shops below their radar for owners like you to consolidate, one neighbor at a time.

The thing to understand about a seller is that they almost always have a reason. A business that runs beautifully rarely goes up for sale. The real value in most home service acquisitions is not the trucks or the equipment. It is the recurring revenue and the customer list. You are buying the phone that keeps ringing, not the tools in the bed.

Score each acquisition target on four motivation signals:

Burnout signals. Owner working 70-plus hour weeks. No second in command. Frustrated posts on social. A spouse pulled into the office and stressed. These are the conversations that close.

Distress signals. Truck logos on Marketplace. Layoff notices. Late vendor payments you hear about through the grapevine. Reviews slowing. Bad reviews sitting unanswered.

Lifestyle signals. Owner over 60 with no succession plan. A health issue mentioned in passing. Kids who clearly do not want the business.

Capital signals. Owner openly looking for a partner, a loan, or a line of credit.

A target with three or four of these is worth a conversation. A target with zero is not for sale at a price you would want to pay.

The valuation reframe for the first conversation

A common seller mistake is pricing the business on what it could be worth once it is fixed up, not what it is worth today. When that comes up, use this frame:

"You want me to pay you today for the work I am going to do to fix it? I would rather bring you on, pay you as we clean it up, and let you share in that upside. But the price I pay you now has to be for what the business is actually worth right now."

That puts the number back on reality while keeping the seller in the deal.

The outreach frame

For a target you have actually studied, lead with their life, not their books:

"I have watched your business for a while. I respect what you built. Before we ever talk price, I want to understand what you actually want out of the next few years, and whether there is a version of this that gets you there."

Most acquisition conversations die because the buyer opens with money. The ones that close open with the seller's goals.

The structure rule and the real math

Paying all cash for a small shop is usually a mistake. Earn-outs, seller financing, and keeping the owner on for a transition are safer structures that keep the seller invested in a clean handoff.

The math is worth knowing because it tells you when to buy and when to sell. Home service businesses today generally trade on a multiple of earnings. Independent HVAC and plumbing shops commonly sell in the range of 3 to 5.5 times seller's discretionary earnings, and shops with strong recurring maintenance contracts command the higher end, per ClearlyAcquired and CT Acquisitions M&A data. Bigger operators earn bigger multiples. A shop doing $500K to $1M in EBITDA averaged around 6x in early 2025, while shops at $5M to $10M in EBITDA pushed past 10x. That spread is the whole opportunity. When you buy a small neighbor at a small-shop multiple and fold their recurring revenue into a larger, cleaner operation, the same earnings are simply worth more inside your business than they were inside theirs.

You do not have to be a big platform to use that. You just have to understand it, so you know when it makes sense to be the buyer and when it makes sense to be the one who sells.

Implementation checklist

This week

List five to eight competitors using the filter criteria
Score every competitor on Categories A, B, and C from your desk
Score yourself last on the same three categories
Identify your weakest category relative to the field

This month

Drive a neighborhood you both serve. Score Categories D and E in person.
Call every competitor and run the Category F speed-to-lead test
Build the gap-prioritization grid
Commit to the top two high-impact, low-cost gaps

This offseason

Run the weakness audit on every competitor
Mark who went dark on ads in the Meta Ad Library and Google Ads Transparency Center
Mark who stopped earning reviews
Mark who laid off or sold equipment
Identify two or three operators with three or more seller-motivation signals
Schedule one informal conversation per quarter with a possible acquisition target